 Turks Press Rescue Efforts in Earthquake Aftermath
di Saturday, 03.May. @ 00:00:00 CEST
By MARC LACEY
Source: New York Times
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BINGOL, Kurdistan-Turkey, 3/5/2003 — The ground still trembles here, although aftershocks from Thursday's devastating earthquake in southeastern Turkey have not slowed frantic rescue efforts at a collapsed boarding school where more than 60 students remain buried. Most are probably dead, but emergency workers are hopeful some are still alive.
From dawn to dusk today, rescue workers in orange jumpsuits dug through a huge pile of concrete and steel, all that is left of a four-story dormitory where 198 students were sleeping when the quake hit in the middle of the night. So far, 45 bodies have been recovered.
Relatives watched the search with forlorn looks, kept back by security personnel. From time to time there was a commotion as a body was discovered, and family members surged forward for a glimpse. More often, it was another victim, a child crushed in the collapse.
But in the day's only glimmer of hope, tiny Enes Gunce, a sixth grader, was found alive 30 hours after his bedroom collapsed around him. Onlookers erupted in cheers.
"I had no hope that Enes would be alive, but he fell in a little gap," said his uncle, Baki Anacur, who helped recover the boy. "There might be others who are small enough to fit in the gaps."
But the authorities said that was unlikely. They called in a crane to dig at the wreckage, exposing more victims of an earthquake that has killed at least 118 people and injured 500 more. The quake, which had a magnitude of 6.4, lasted only 17 seconds, but it came along one of Turkey's two major fault lines and left damage for miles.
Hundreds of angry survivors converged on the governor's office here to demand more tents and other relief supplies. Some demonstrators, mainly Kurds who have a longstanding mistrust of the Turkish police, tried to storm the building, and the police fired automatic weapons into the air to disperse them.
Other protesters stoned police vehicles, prompting authorities to call in heavily armed reinforcements.
The tensions between eastern Turkey's predominantly Kurdish population and government security forces are tied to the war that Kurdish rebels have waged in this mountainous area for 15 years, prompting fierce crackdowns.
Government officials accused Kurdish rebels today of trying to take advantage of the natural disaster to press their cause. But some protesters said security forces had overreacted, and displaced people called on the area's governor, Huseyin Avni Cos, to help them find shelter or resign.
"We just came here to get tents," one protester, Ramazan Yararli, told The Associated Press. "But they started firing on us."
At the boarding school, the worst of the many damaged buildings around Bingol, the cries for help that emergency workers heard coming from the wreckage throughout the day on Thursday had stopped by today. Rescue crews stopped their digging for two hours this morning so that sonar equipment could be trained on the fallen school.
"There were no sounds, no voices," one worker said.
Desperate faces surrounded the school site. There were mothers and fathers praying for a miracle. There were crestfallen teachers. Some students who were rescued waited for a similar fate for their friends.
"A lot of my friends are missing," Zulkuf Ercan, 13, said, rattling off the names of Vedat, Serafettin, Mesut and Yavuz, all of whom were still trapped inside, as far as he knew.
One teacher took roll call of those students who gathered around the damaged school, just as she does daily, although this time it was to determine who had survived and who was still trapped inside.
"We hope he's still alive," Ali Yalcin, 46, said of his nephew, who is 13. "That's all we can do — wait and hope."
One young girl, Bircan Dolgun, had her scarf swept from her head down to her shoulders as she cried heavily near the fallen dormitory. She mumbled her brother's name between sobs.
"I have been waiting here for two days," she said. "Everybody goes home with their brother, and mine is still in there. Where is he?"
The police sought to push the relatives from the scene, but they inched their way back, many with tears in their eyes.
Some of the survivors recounted the terrifying moments they endured, beginning at 3:27 a.m., when their dormitory began shaking with a fury.
"It was just an ordinary night," said Zulkuf, who was in a room on the top floor of the four-story dormitory with eight other boys. "I washed my face before I went to bed. It was 9:30, the usual time. But later the bed started shaking and all of us ended up on the floor."
The ceiling caved in, and all eight boys in Zulkuf's room were crowded together in a crevice. Two among them were crushed by the rubble. The others scrambled to escape.
The boys said they had begun to dig through the bricks when a small hole emerged. One boy tried to signal the villagers who had arrived with the fluorescent light on his wristwatch.
Teachers living in a separate building that was largely undamaged ran to their cars and trained the headlights on the crumpled school.
The scene was frightening. The school's four floors had become just one, and dazed children in pajamas were crawling through the giant pile of rubble.
"It was the worst thing I'll ever see," said Bahar Yilmaz, 27, a teacher, who had put the students to bed that night. "I lost one colleague and I lost so many children."
Scientists said the damage could have been even worse.
The earthquake occurred along the East Anatolian fault, and appears to have been unrelated to a succession of devastating quakes that have struck west to east along the North Anatolian fault since 1939. In 1999, 17,000 people were killed in an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 on the North Anatolian fault near the town of Izmit in northwestern Turkey, 900 miles to the west of Thursday's earthquake.
Motion along the East Anatolian fault is slower than along the North Anatolian fault, and the quakes in this region are typically smaller in magnitude. An earthquake of similar magnitude in 1971 that struck just 30 miles to the southwest of Thursday's epicenter killed 1,000 people.
Dr. M. Nafi Toksoz, a professor of geophysics and seismology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said construction standards improved in that part of Turkey after the 1971 earthquake.
"As a whole, it's encouraging that things have improved since 1971, that lessons were learned and applied," Dr. Toksoz said.
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